The post Ex-Jags Employee Facing Up To 30 Years In Prison For Stealing $22M To Fund Gambling appeared first on SportsHandle.
A former Jacksonville Jaguars employee is facing a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison after he pleaded guilty on Thursday to stealing millions of dollars from the NFL franchise.
Amit Patel admitted to knowingly devising a scheme to defraud the Jaguars through a virtual credit card (VCC) program his former employer intended to use exclusively for business-related purchases. Patel, 31, copped to stealing approximately $22.2 million from the team over a four-year period through February 2023.
An attorney for Patel said in a statement last week that his client checked into an in-patient rehabilitation center this spring after suffering from a considerable gambling addiction. The majority of the misappropriated funds were used for sports betting and daily fantasy sports on two websites, according to the attorney.
Patel, a former financial employee of the team, did not comment Thursday outside a federal courthouse in Jacksonville.
A brazen scheme
Beginning in September 2019, Patel used his position as administrator of the Jags’ VCC program to make hundreds of transactions without any legitimate business purpose, according to court filings released Thursday. During an October interview with federal investigators, Patel admitted to “artificially inflating” legitimate expenses and generating fictitious but “realistic sounding expenses” as part of the scheme.
Last November alone, Patel made $5.6 million in fraudulent transactions, an amount that typically would have exceeded the cap of the VCC program, court records show. As a result, Patel made a request with the bank that financed the program to increase the limit. Per the request, the limit was increased from $4.75 million to $7.5 million.
Alex King, Patel’s attorney, said last week that the vast majority of his client’s DFS wagers were made on FanDuel, one of the nation’s most prominent websites for fantasy sports. Patel, according to his attorney, also placed wagers on DraftKings, FanDuel’s main rival.
Citing records from fantasy sports website RotoGrinders, ESPN reported this week that Patel had a proclivity for entering high-stakes fantasy contests. (RotoGrinders is owned by Better Collective, the parent company of Sports Handle). Since 2017, Patel wagered nearly $500,000 on fantasy tournaments in multiple sports under the username ParlayPicker.
The user’s last visit on Rotogrinders occurred at some point Thursday, according to his profile on the website.
Under an agreement with prosecutors, the government will seek approximately $20 million in forfeitures from Patel, as well as an additional $20 million in restitution. Patel listed a Tesla Model 3 sedan, a Florida condo, and a luxury watch valued at $82,000 among the assets available for forfeiture.
At Thursday’s hearing, Patel told a federal judge that he is suffering from a gambling addiction, one he has sought to treat through weekly therapy sessions.
An NFL investigation of the matter found no evidence of match manipulation, a league spokesman told ESPN. The league also determined that Patel did not use any inside information on the wagers in question.
Under NFL policy, league and team employees are prohibited from taking part in daily fantasy sports. Team employees and employees of the league are also barred from wagering on NFL games.
A formal date for Patel’s sentencing hearing has yet to be scheduled.
The post Ex-Jags Employee Facing Up To 30 Years In Prison For Stealing $22M To Fund Gambling appeared first on SportsHandle.
